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I think I'm looking for video editing software that has some sort of 2D drawing/animation support.

For example try to imagine a video capture of a busy road from the sky and wanting to tell your viewers: "Pay attention to this specific car".

I'm looking for something that allows me to have the entire video on-screen, activate a drawing function, pause the video on a specific frame, draw a pretty box around an object, fast forward a few frames and draw the box somewhere else and have the program generate the intermediate frames (tweening).

Any ideas?

UPDATE:

Thanks for the suggestions. I've started evaluating Adobe After Effects CS5 but there's one problem: even if the product fulfills my requirements I feel the price is a bit too steep (retail is $999). I'm not expecting to use the product very often and it's all for personal/non-commercial use.

So... I'll probably take a look at one of the open source (and gratis) suggestions after experimenting with After Effects.

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up vote 1 down vote

Flash has this capability, and even though Apple hates it like rats ratpoison, it's still a pretty good animator/video editor for the masses.

You may also find some place that does this commercially (e.g. Cartoon Network) and try to contact them, interview them or something and find out what they use. They probably use their own solution but you never know.

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These days, I expect most of the pros use off-the-shelf tools like After Effects, but +1 for Flash. – Steve314 Nov 18 '10 at 13:22
@Steve314 When I looked it didn't seem AE could handle motion tweening as well as Flash. :-( – digitxp Nov 20 '10 at 14:50
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Adobe After Effects - if you can afford it. In some ways it is like Flash, but with a lot more features and targeted at professional video editing - kind of making Flash look like a kids toy. The norm is to render the final result to video files rather than to generate a real-time rendered animation file.

BUT - I haven't actually used it - only seen bits of a few training videos, and that some time ago.

Jahshaka has been described as an open source after-effects alternative, and CineFX is apparently the new Jahshaka. I'm afraid I know about as much about these as I discovered in a couple of minutes looking at web sites.

There's also a tool for animation and interactive media called Processing, which (you guessed it) I haven't actually used.

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Jashaka never worked for me. It always installed something then nuked itself :-(. – digitxp Nov 20 '10 at 14:50
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